Aldeer.com Forums Alabama Deer Talk Quality Deer Management Throw n Mow Q&A

Nice pond toothdoc

Week 2
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It may not look like it but theres a lot of peas, beans and sunflowers in the field. I didn’t spray before planting so lots of clover and weeds are filling in.

I'm slinging my seed out in the Am. We'll see how this goes.

Looking good Turkey_neck……..

I see a bunch of sprouts in there……Looks like you have a bunch of grass coming in too but I wouldn’t sweat it. Let the deer eat the good stuff out of it and the grass produce your hay for fall….A grass specie needs to be a part of the mix anyways. It really doesn’t matter if it’s millet or crabgrass. Neither one is very attractive to deer as a food source but they DO provide a lot of carbon to your soil. If you grow off a nice thick field of vegetation and the deer keep using it… then it’s a success. You’ve accomplished your goals for deer and soil. The ugliest thing we could see is a field that isn’tt fertile enough to grow hardly ANY vegetation and much of it is thin or bare….. you get what toothdoc is dealing with around the pond.

Yea that’s my top field it is gonna get lots of N this summer to push it. It’s always thin and the soil is very hard in the field. I’m really gonna try and ramp my thatch up on that field this year or I’ll need to go back to discing that one cause it doesn’t produce like I want it to.

There was a lot of young crabgrass when I drug my field down. The mix also had millet and sorghum so I should have several grass species to add back to the soil.

Maybe it'll stay wet for another few weeks. Things look pretty promising for the upcoming week. If it does keep raining you'll have a jungle growing in that field in the pic before too long.

Speaking of jungles……I'd be happy if my whole field eventually looks like this during the summer. The woodline used to be about where Shelby is standing but I’ve pushed it back and created a buffer of natural veg……That’s just a salad bar mix of broadleaf species…ragweed, pokeweed, blackberry, dewberry, smilax, lambsquarter, etc…etc……It’s taken awhile for these plants to come back into my field during the summer instead of just growing crabgrass. I think the biggest reasons have to do with organic matter and the microbial community. Imagine if we let the buffer go ahead and jump early in the summer but we use the suppression power of the cereal rye to delay the rest of the field until later on into the summer…keeping the deer with young veg to eat for a pretty prolonged period.

Well I slung it and mowed. 150# of proso millet on 5 acres. We'll see what this does

Good luck with it.....

T&M IC peas into 5 fields this weekend, clover is pretty thick in these fields and the damn dog finnel won't leave me alone. I forgot to take pictures of all the fields and only took one after picture. right when I got done I got a slow inch rain. interested to see how fast the IC peas choke the clover out. the clover in the pic is a pink clover that's a perennial. the other pic from the tractor looking at the clover is a white clover field. my main goals is not for the peas to make but more or less grow a couple weeks worth of good food correlated with my clover, suppress weeds, and put some nutrients back into the soil. our best seasons with food plot success have been years after we planted a summer crop of some sort in our fields


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Your fields look awesome!

Dog fennel loves nitrogen. Its hard to keep it out of clover fields. Toothdoc, i'd call that a big beautiful lake, not a pond.

Just to be clear. The pic with the fishing pole is Neely Henry a couple miles away. That was me having a beer and fishing for catfish after a long hard days work. The pond in the pic with the field is about 2ac.

is it possible to have too much thatch????? Tried to make myself T & M a mix the other day but the field was so thick with Wheat and other grasses that I just couldn't see any seed getting soil contact AT ALL

Yes.....As a matter of fact, that is the conundrum that many folks are eventually probably gonna find themselves in once their fields really become productive. How to handle all the dang biomass?

It’ll require some brain storming and adapting when you reach that point. Your biggest problem with putting massive amounts of biomass on the ground is that you’re gonna completely smother out any undergrowth eventually. I think you’re also tying up a lot of N in the process with massive crops. That's one reason you want clover in with it. It helps compensate for some of that N that's being tied up in decomposition.

One way you can help thin it out some is to mow during the spring after everything bolts…..about the time you start seeing the first few seed heads appear here and there…..maybe early April or so. Another option is to just let it go and crumble on its own during the summer. That’s the simplest way. Another option is to plant at a thinner rate in the fall if you can get away with it on your fields. That’ll kind of just depend on the size of the fields and deer density. I'm sure there's other things you could do too....Like I said, it'll require some adapting and improvising.

We definitely over seeded this fall. Will likely cut back some. It was honestly so thick that the bush hog bogged down once or twice. Im going to mow for sure early spring next year anyways ( mainly for turkey hunting ) but I can see where that will help with our thatch amount also.
Some of my fields did better than others due to just having more clay in the soil but most are absolutely short on Nitrogen. Some of the wheat and Oats started to yellow around mid December in our fall plots. I hit them with Nitrogen right before New Years and they popped back really quick. Hopefully with the summer planting and adding clover into our mixes this fall we wont have to reapply nitrogen during season next year....

In theory, if you could get some kind of legume growing during the summer to give your fields enough N to run them during the early fall then I think you might be able to get by with one application of synthetic N maybe around Thanksgiving or maybe early Dec…. It’ll just depend on how well you can grow legumes during the summer though. Unless you have big fields then I’d look to some other legume besides beans. I just don’t think small fields will just ever produce enough toonage to even start talking about adding any significant amount of N back to the soil……You may have to look to something different that won't be hammered as hard like partridge pea, birdsfoot trefoil, lespedeza, etc….Sunn hemp is commonly being used too and may be everyone's best option overall. I don't think it's technically considered a legume but it does return nitrogen to the soil. Again though....you gotta be able to grow a good crop of it for that to matter. If the deer decimate it then you've not accomplished anything from a N standpoint. Google "summer legumes" and there's some good info on there. I tried to link everyone to the Georgia University site but it won't link for some reason.

So, CNC, my mix that I mentioned a few pages above - sunflowers, buckwheat, peas, beans, and milo/sorghum may have been a screwup on my part. As it turns out, I think I added way too much sorghum, which is now taking over a lot of the field and may be choking out my peas/beans. The buckwheat came up great first, then some peas and beans, and now sorghum. Should I just let it go and T &M again in the fall or should I start over? My goals were to create some forage for deer in the summer, and to experiment with T &M in the summer. Well, now I know that sorghum works a little too well in a T & M mix! Let me know if you have any thoughts. Thanks.